[LINK] Minor Revolution in Australian Government IT

[grove at zeta.org.au]

On Tue, 5 Feb 2008, Danny Yee wrote:

> Here I'm told everyone wants to do "Business IT" rather than computer
> science.  And the people with the mathematical background who might
> once have gone into compilers, algorithms, and suchlike have all been
> headhunted by investment banks to do quantitative finance.
>
> A sustained recession might change this...

My own skills as a programmer as part of my UNIX admin work is 
atrophying as more and more off the shelf products are bought.

I fun myself by playing with N1SPS, which lets me write XML scripts,
perl and shell without making it too obvious and I try to do at least
a little C every now and again, but if I ever mention it, it doesn't 
go down very well.

The extreme example is the way web services at <some uni> are being 
outsourced, taking bread and butter work from staff who actually 
enjoy what they do and are quite good at it, 
only to have it run by an external company in spite of protests
and utterances against, only to be ignored by managers who don't 
seem to "get it"....


rachel

-- 
Rachel Polanskis                 Kingswood, Greater Western Sydney, Australia
grove at zeta.org.au                http://www.zeta.org.au/~grove/grove.html
 		The price of greatness is responsibility.